SEO is about helping search engines understand your content and helping customers find your site and decide whether to visit it. ^[1] A service company’s website, whether in maintenance, consultancy or training, does not need elaborate tricks. It needs the basics that Google sets out in its official guidance.

Google Search Essentials has three parts: the technical requirements a page needs to appear at all, the spam policies that can lower a page’s ranking or remove it, and the key best practices that most affect ranking and appearance. ^[2] The first of those practices is to create helpful, reliable, people-first content. ^[2]

Google’s starter guide describes well-organised, easy-to-read, original, up-to-date and helpful content as likely to influence a site more than any other recommendation. ^[1]

Step one: can Google see your site at all?

Before thinking about ranking, make sure your pages are indexed. Search Google with the site: operator followed by your domain; if your pages do not appear, check the technical requirements. ^[1] Google finds most pages through links from pages it has already crawled, so internal links must reach every service page. ^[1]

• Sitemap: a file listing the URLs you care about. Google’s guide says it is not required, and that the priority is making sure people know about your site. ^[1]
• URL Inspection tool in Search Console: shows whether Google sees the page as a user does, including CSS and JavaScript. ^[1]
• Duplicate content: not a breach of Google’s spam policies, but it can make for a poor user experience and wastes crawl resources. Set one canonical version of each piece of content with a redirect, or with rel="canonical" where a redirect is not possible. ^[1]
• URLs: use descriptive words that help readers, because parts of the URL can appear in search results. ^[1]

One page per service, in the customer’s words

The most common mistake on service company sites is a single “Our services” page that lists everything in a few lines. It is better to have a separate page for each main service that answers the customer’s questions: what is the service, who is it for, how does it work, and what do I need to request it?

Google advises using the words people would actually search with and placing them in prominent locations such as the page title, main heading, image alt text and link text. ^[2] Anticipate different terms for the same need: one customer may type “AC maintenance” and another “air conditioner repair”. ^[1]

Google suggests asking three questions of every page: who created it, how was it produced, and why does it exist? ^[3] Warning signs include content made mainly to attract search engine visits, or content that summarises what others have written without adding value. ^[3] If your service touches people’s health, finances or safety, Google gives extra weight to the reliability of content on such topics. ^[3]

Hypothetical example: a building maintenance company has a single “Our services” page. It splits it into five pages: air conditioning, plumbing, electrical work, annual maintenance contracts and emergency call-outs. Each page describes the scope of work, the cities covered, how to place a request and the questions customers often ask, and all five are linked from the home page. Every search now has a page that answers it directly, instead of one general page that answers none of them precisely.

Titles, descriptions, links and images

• Page title: unique to the page, clear, concise and an accurate description of its content. ^[1]
• Meta description: short, unique to one page and a summary of its key points. Google usually builds the snippet from page content and uses the meta description some of the time. ^[1]
• Link text: describe the destination page instead of writing “click here”; internal and external links help readers and search engines alike. ^[1]
• Images: use sharp, clear images near the text they relate to, with short alt text that describes how the image relates to the content. ^[1]
• Untrusted links: add nofollow or a similar annotation to links you do not trust and to links users add in comments. ^[1]
• Subheadings: there is no ideal number, and their semantic order helps screen readers rather than ranking. ^[1]

Telling people about the site is also part of the basics. Google recommends promotion through social media, taking part in the professional communities your services matter to, advertising and word of mouth, while avoiding the kind of excess that can look like manipulation. ^{[1, 2]}

A bilingual site: Arabic and English

Many service companies in the Gulf run an Arabic version and an English version. Giving each language its own subdomain is not enough for Google to work out who each version is for, so you need hreflang annotations that link the versions explicitly. ^[4]

• Pick one method: link tags in the page head, HTTP headers or the sitemap. Google treats them as equivalent. ^[4]
• Each version must list itself and the other versions. If the Arabic page points to the English page and the English page does not point back, the annotations may be ignored. ^[4]
• A language code on its own is valid, such as ar or en, and a region code can be added, such as en-GB, but a region code on its own is not valid. ^[4]
• Use x-default for the fallback page, such as a language selector. ^[4]

Google does not rely on the HTML lang attribute to determine a page’s language; it uses its own algorithms. ^[4] A country-code domain only matters if you are targeting users in a specific country, and even then its effect is limited. ^[1]

Local visibility: your Google Business Profile

For a service company that serves a particular city or area, much of the search starts on the map. Google sets local ranking by three main factors: relevance, meaning how well a profile matches what someone is searching for; distance between the business and the searcher; and prominence, meaning how well known the business is, with inputs including links to the business and its number of reviews. ^[5]

What Google recommends in practice: ^[5]

1. Complete the profile: address, categories and attributes.
2. Verify the business to show you are authorised to represent it.
3. Keep regular and special opening hours up to date, such as Ramadan and Eid hours.
4. Reply to customer reviews.
5. Add photos and videos that show your services.

There is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. ^[5] If you have branches in more than one GCC country, give each branch its own profile with its real details.

What does not deserve your time?

Google’s starter guide dismisses several common beliefs. Google Search does not use the keywords meta tag, excessive keyword repetition is tiresome and breaches the spam policies, and keywords in the domain name or URL path have hardly any effect on ranking. ^[1] There is no ideal word count, and the choice between subdomains and subfolders is whatever suits your business. ^[1] E-E-A-T, meaning experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, is not a direct ranking factor, although signals of it help Google’s systems identify helpful content. ^{[1, 3]}

Conclusion: a short action plan

1. Check indexing with the site: operator and the URL Inspection tool.
2. Split your “Our services” page into one page per service, in the customer’s words.
3. Write a unique title and description for each page, and review link text and images.
4. Connect the Arabic and English versions with reciprocal hreflang annotations.
5. Complete your Business Profile and reply to reviews.

Then wait a few weeks before judging the results, because changes can take anything from hours to several months to show. ^[1]